Google Play Store Gets Magazines, TV Shows and More

Google announced some huge improvements to the Google Play Store at Google I/O today. Magazines and TV shows have been added by the hundreds, along with some big improvements on the App side as well.

TV episodes can be purchased either a-la-carte or by season, and it looks like most of the major studios are on board. Magazines are also a new item in the store, and can be purchased by issue or by subscription. Magazines look to be not just print replicas, but also offer interaction if the publisher chooses.

On the app side of the store, Google announced support for encryption of apps, which developers have wanted for quite a while to help prevent app piracy. Smart Updates will allow delta-updating, which means only the parts of an app that have been changed will be downloaded, using on average 1/3 less data than the previous method.

Also announced were updates to the Cloud-to-Device messaging service that Google provides to developers, which allows background messaging to apps for notifications and such. The service is free to all developers with no quotas, and includes things like multicast and payload delivery.